At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali in September, solar irrigation, cooling, processing and other productive uses of renewable energy featured prominently. Yet the discussion repeatedly came back to a broader question: what does it take for these technologies to deliver real value? Finance, enterprise capability, infrastructure and value-chain relationships all play a part in determining whether an energy solution strengthens a business, improves livelihoods and supports a more resilient food system.
For Matia Mandela, Programme Director at Energy 4 Impact, a PREO delivery partner, the Forum underscored a question with direct implications for programme design: once the technology works, what else needs to function around it for it to flourish? Productive energy can unlock new opportunities, but only when the wider conditions allow enterprises to grow, farmers and processors to benefit, and successful models to move beyond individual projects.
Start with what the food system needs to achieve
The value of solar irrigation is not ultimately that farmers gain access to renewable power as an end in itself. It is that irrigation can increase productivity, reduce vulnerability to erratic rainfall and enable the cultivation of higher-value crops. Similarly, cooling creates value when it reduces post-harvest losses and helps producers access more profitable markets, while processing strengthens livelihoods by enabling businesses to add value to products, increase incomes and create jobs.
This macro perspective has implications for how productive use programmes are designed. Rather than beginning with a specific technology, the first question becomes about what farmers, processors or enterprises are trying to achieve, and whether energy is one of the limitations stopping them. PREO is already seeing this shift in its pipeline: analysis of its 2025 call for proposals found agricultural models moving from standalone products towards more integrated value-chain offers, combining technologies such as solar irrigation with input finance, market access and agronomic support. Access to technology of course remains important, but it is the wider ecosystem of support that determines whether impact is achieved at scale.
When the limitation moves beyond the enterprise
A productive-energy enterprise may have a functioning technology and a credible proposition but still struggle because customers cannot access finance, distribution networks are weak, infrastructure is unreliable, market information is poor or investors lack enough evidence to price the opportunity. These are not necessarily problems an individual company can solve.
PREO supports productive use businesses to bridge some of these gaps through catalytic grant funding, technical assistance and evidence generation. Here, Energy 4 Impact provides hands-on support as enterprises strengthen their business models and move towards commercial scale.
There is also a point at which helping an enterprise scale requires more than making the enterprise stronger. The binding challenge may sit in customer finance, policy, infrastructure, distribution or coordination across a value chain. At that stage, the programme design question becomes not simply what support the company needs, but what needs to change around it and which other actors need to be involved.
Who gets to own the opportunity?
The Forum’s strong focus on young people added another dimension to this discussion. Young people are often described as beneficiaries of food-system programmes or participants in consultations, yet participation alone is a limited ambition if they are expected to drive the future of Africa’s food systems.
A young entrepreneur using solar irrigation, cooling or processing technology is not simply an energy user. They may be building a company, employing others, creating services and changing how value moves through a local economy. If the aim is to create functioning markets, then who is able to build businesses, attract capital, make decisions and capture value within those markets becomes part of the scaling question itself.
This means asking whether finance, enterprise support and value-chain development reflect the realities of younger businesses, and whether emerging markets create genuine routes to ownership and growth rather than participation alone. Youth agency is therefore not a separate social objective sitting beside the market question, it is part of determining who gets to shape, own and benefit from the markets being built.
From successful projects to functioning markets
The strongest thread running through the discussions in Kigali was not that technology matters less, but that technology does not scale itself. A successful pilot can establish technical performance and begin to demonstrate commercial viability, while a functioning market requires more: enterprises capable of growing, customers able to pay, investors with evidence they can act on, institutions that provide workable conditions, and relationships across value chains that allow different actors to benefit.
That is why the missing connections matter. For the next generation of agri-energy programmes, the challenge is more than what it takes to identify promising technologies or businesses, it requires us to diagnose where the limitations really sit, understand which actors need to move, and build the conditions in which viable solutions can travel further than the programmes from which they emerged.